EQUITY / Losing Ground / More than 40 years after the Civil Rights Act, why do women's wages still trail men's?

Jenny Strasburg

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, January 9, 2005

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Salary Discrimination. Chronicle illustration by Tom Murray

Salary Discrimination. Chronicle illustration by Tom Murray

EQUITY / Losing Ground / More than 40 years after the Civil Rights Act, why do women's wages still trail men's?

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One penny on the dollar.

That's the margin by which the typical salary of a woman working a full- time, year-round job slipped relative to a man's average salary in 2003. For those who find cause for concern in the nation's persistent gender wage gap, last year delivered a bit of backsliding.

Women, on average, earned 76 cents for every dollar that men brought home, down from a record-high 77 cents on the dollar in 2002, according to the latest annual report from the nonpartisan U.S. General Accounting Office.

Last year's penny shift marked the first increase in the gender wage gap this decade, government income figures show. Some observers blame the economy in part for the recent slippage among women, saying that a downturn tends to punish them disproportionately because they hold more of the nation's lower- rung jobs.

But the economy is just a piece of the picture. Some prominent researchers have been surprised to learn that even though women are attaining higher-than-ever levels of education -- and also reaching higher rungs on the corporate ladder -- that progress has not narrowed the wage gap as expected, according to the National Association for Female Executives, a New York-based women's professional organization.

One commonly presumed factor has less to do with economics than with social convention. Simply put, are women as astute as men when it comes to bargaining for the pay they want and deserve?

Traditionally, they haven't been, and the consequences can't be ignored, says Betty Spence, president of the National Association for Female Executives.

"Make sure you know what your average pay is for your field," Spence advises. "Find out what the men are earning and go in and ask for that. Smart women are taking courses in learning how to negotiate better. Too often they worry about keeping the relationship [with supervisors] warm."

If that's true, warm relationships offer cold comfort financially. Even adjusting for occupation, race, experience level and other factors that can cause variations in pay by gender, working women's salaries looked slightly better, but still checked in at 80 cents on the dollar relative to each buck earned by their male counterparts.

Children have opposite effects on the earning power of men and women, according to a 2003 GAO survey. Men with kids earn 2.1 percent more, on average, than men without kids. Women with kids earn 2.5 percent less than women without kids, the GAO said.

The long-scrutinized wage-gap ratio, adjusted for those variance factors, has remained roughly flat for most of the past two decades. That helps explain why high school senior Lisa Morales -- who at 17 is reasonably irked to be headed for a labor pool where women consistently work harder than men for the same rewards -- might consider the latest figures less than revelatory.

"In my economics class, we hear about the gender gap when we're talking about the labor market. I just kind of assumed it was so," says the Castro Valley teen, a student at Moreau Catholic High School in Hayward. Another reason for Morales' nonalarm: Perhaps not unlike countless women who came before her, she believes her generation comes along at the right time to end the stagnation.

"It's not fair," she says of the enduring pay disparity. "But I look at it as a challenge. If I'm intelligent enough to go out there and get that job, I deserve to have it. I'm going to prove to you that I can. ... I feel like in my generation, that's the attitude. As a girl growing up, you get the same thing on the playground. If you want to play basketball, you have to prove it to the guys that you want to play."

Bring it on, says Morales. "Put me on a basketball court, and I'm just as good as the guys."

Longtime students of the wage-gap issue would applaud such confidence, even if they don't share it.

"We're going in the wrong direction, which I must say is very discouraging," Spence says.

The association publishes an annual survey tracking pay levels in 20 fields ranging from advertising, banking and engineering to medicine, law, retail and technology. The survey perennially finds that men out-earn women across the board, taking each industry as a whole. And 2003 was no exception.

"It's education, it's public relations, it's science," says Spence, noting that the salary survey is designed to account for variations in skill and experience level. Its findings are based on figures reported by companies and trade groups and collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A few snapshots: The gap between women and men was small among chief executives of nonprofits -- $84,070 on average for women versus $84,825 for men. But the difference grew more pronounced further down the ladder -- for instance, women earned $73,907 versus $96,655 for men among the government lobbyists employed by nonprofits.

Female advertising account executives made $49,000 compared to $56,000 for men, according to the National Association for Female Executives survey. Retail-store salespeople earned $19,864 if they were women, $31,148 if they were men.

Database analysts at technology firms earned $68,002 if they were female, $78,088 if they were male. However, female Web designers fared better than their male counterparts, earning $66,500 compared with $62,250 among men.

At magazines, female editors in chief made about $79,000 compared with $104,000 earned by men at the same level.

The wage imbalances continue, favoring men among college professors and elementary and high school teachers, chemists, physicians ranging from neurosurgeons to obstetricians, lawyers and library directors.

Morales, the East Bay teen about to finish high school, thinks she might go into journalism. How do journalists fare? On average, female newspaper reporters make $37,731 compared with $46,758 among men, the salary survey says. However, in TV and radio broadcasting, women outearn men.

Morales said that she will not be daunted. "Writing is what I like to do, " she said.

Perhaps most troubling to Spence and others who analyze these figures year after year is that women in recent decades have benefited from more- advanced education and tougher anti-bias laws. Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, landmark legislation that targeted discrimination based on race, color, creed, national origin and sex in arenas including education, employment and public accommodations.

Title VII of the act effectively opened entire fields of employment to women by creating never-before-seen protections against workplace sex bias.

More recently, women increasingly spend less time away from work caring for children.

In other words, if women continue to lag even with all that progress, then what's the fix?

"Closing the gap any more is really going to require concerted effort on the part of our nation, and our nation is not making those concerted efforts, " says Spence, who calls for more family-supportive legislation similar to California's landmark Family Leave Act, as well as more aggressive efforts to expose young women to fields such as law, medicine and engineering.

The way things are going, it will be another 50 years before women's pay catches up with men's, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research, a nonprofit public policy organization in Washington, D.C.

That projection is disheartening to Jean Taggart, 86, of San Francisco, who still has the buttons she wore during the feminist wave in the 1970s that said "59 cents."

"The idea was that people would ask, 'What's that mean?' We would tell them that 59 cents was what women earned, in comparison to what men earned," says Taggart, who retired from a career in college personnel administration and university-staff career counseling.

Her generation had to rouse itself to battle the injustice, she says. "I don't think women accept it that much any more, especially young women. We've advanced a lot, but it's not enough. When the hell is it ever going to happen? I doubt it will be in my lifetime."

U.S. Census Bureau figures for 2003 show a median income of $40,668 for men who worked full time and year-round. For women, it was $30,724. Women of color, particularly Hispanic and African American women, pull in still-lower wages, on average, than do white women.

Public policy groups point out that lower wages also mean women generally earn lower pensions than men, and are less able to save while they're working, leaving them less-prepared to care for themselves after retirement.

"With the economic downturn and decline in jobs, my guess is that affects folks particularly who are in lower-wage jobs, and less-secure jobs. And by definition, you would include women in those groups. They're disproportionately working low-wage jobs," says Jocelyn Frye, director of legal and public policy with the National Partnership for Women and Families, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit public education and advocacy group promoting equal access to health care and jobs.

"The truth of the matter is that we get into the habit of saying, 'We've made a lot of progress,' and then not really taking the next step. ... Progress, to be meaningful, has to be sustained through different economic scenarios."

Frye, Spence and others believe that women's salaries in general will benefit from attention paid to recent high-profile sex-discrimination lawsuits. Those include actions alleging bias against women at Wall Street brokerage Morgan Stanley and mass discounter Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Morgan Stanley in July spent $54 million to settle a sex discrimination suit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart denies all charges that it discriminates against women in hiring, pay and promotions, in an ongoing class-action lawsuit challenged by the company in federal court in San Francisco.

Regardless of the outcome, Frye says, "high-profile suits make a difference. I think both the carrot and the stick are effective in narrowing the wage gap."

However, critics of the continued attention paid to gender-based wage differences contend that millions of women enter lower-paying fields by choice. The wage-gap discussion has been criticized as dismissing the nonquantifiable personal benefits many women gain from traveling more flexible, less-demanding career paths.

Equal-pay advocates respond that more women than ever work out of necessity, not simply out of choice. Moreover, they say, much of the pay disparity faced by women cannot be dismissed solely on the grounds of career choices and traditional family-work priorities.

"There remains this unexplained gap that can't be explained by anything but discrimination," says Frye. "I personally don't know people who choose to be paid less."

Societal strictures on discussing compensation in the workplace serve to perpetuate pay disparities by keeping the issue in the dark, Frye and others say.

The EEOC, the agency charged with enforcing federal anti-bias provisions, since 1992 has brought just 22 suits against companies alleging violations of the federal Equal Pay Act of 1963. While equal-pay actions also fall under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the EEOC acknowledges that gender-based claims are some of the most difficult to substantiate.

"Discrimination in pay based on gender is very difficult to prove," says Jennifer Kaplan, an EEOC spokeswoman in Washington. "Employers very often are able to explain discrepancies in pay on many factors," including experience levels and pay differentials based on work shifts. The same goes for wage- discrimination charges based on race, ethnicity and religion, she says.

The EEOC has 721 investigators and 155 trial attorneys working in 51 field offices responsible for enforcing the panoply of employment- discrimination laws related to age, disability, national origin and all other factors.

Even among the many types of discrimination, gender-based wage bias enjoys a certain level of unhappy distinction. Kaplan says: When it comes to the wage gap, "the EEOC's Office of Legal Counsel believes that progress toward workplace equality between men and women seems to have stalled over the last decade or so."

As for last year's penny loss, "Sometimes there are blips in statistics," says Spence. "I'd love to see it be just a blip." She'll know better when this year's figures come out.